More CRISPRs

The NIH has announced several new additions to the CRISPR world of slicing proteins. As they state:

An international team of CRISPR-Cas researchers has identified three new naturally-occurring systems that show potential for genome editing. The discovery and characterization of these systems is expected to further expand the genome editing toolbox, opening new avenues for biomedical research.  The research, published today in the journal Molecular Cell, was supported in part by the National Institutes of Health. “This work shows a path to discovery of novel CRISPR-Cas systems with diverse properties, which are demonstrated here in direct experiments,” said Eugene Koonin, Ph.D., senior investigator at the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), National Library of Medicine (NLM), part of the NIH. “The most remarkable aspect of the story is how evolution has achieved a broad repertoire of biological activities, a feat we can take advantage of for new genome manipulation tools.” Enzymes from the CRISPR system are revolutionizing the field of genomics, allowing researchers to target specific regions of the genome and edit DNA at precise locations.  

“CRISPR” stands for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, which are key components of a system used by bacteria to defend against invading viruses. Cas9 — one of the enzymes produced by the CRISPR system — binds to the DNA in a highly sequence-specific manner and cuts it, allowing precise manipulation of a region of DNA. Enzymes such as Cas9 provide researchers with a gene editing tool that is faster, less expensive and more precise than previously developed methods. The three newly-characterized systems share some features with Cas9 and Cpf1, a recently characterized CRISPR enzyme, but have unique properties that could potentially be exploited for novel genome editing applications. This study highlights the diversity of CRISPR systems, which can be leveraged to develop more efficient, effective, and precise ways to edit DNA.

The "toolbox" for gene editing is expanding a an ever increasing rate. The original Cas9 enzyme which was the baseline for CRISPR work cut the gene at specific but opposite sites. That was good but the newer versions allow for "sticky" ends which dramatically reduce the chance of recombination errors.

We believe that this is but the beginning of an ever expanding set of such tools and well worth following.